As the name implies, the Glossary of Cognitive Activism is an iterative activist dictionary composed of 330 words that together describe and navigate the technological, ecological, sociogenic, artistic and philosophical relations that today compose our general intelligence. The book now in its fourth edition expands upon those technological relations that pertain to the neural commons of the mental laborer or cognitariat, the site of the brain’s neural plasticity and neural variability important for the process of political, cultural and ecologic sculpting. It pushes back against contemporary forms of neural-digital despotism at our doorstep and provides for possibilities of becoming and emancipation.

Each of its entries — which range in topic from the central nervous system and brain-computer interfaces to ChatGPT and conceptual art — explicates a key term in contemporary culture. The cumulative effect is astonishing: while every entry can profitably be read in isolation, the Glossary as a whole amounts to a brilliant account of the material brain’s entanglement with its surrounding environment.

For Neidich the human brain is far more than grey matter encased in a skull: it is profoundly integrated with the social, political, and cultural phenomena that constitute the world in which we live. For this reason, human cognition is profoundly vulnerable to the new despotism that is seeking in various ways to reshape it, but it also has the capacity to serve as the site of potent acts of resistance. Forging connections between such apparently disparate domains as neuroscience, ecology, political economy, and aesthetics, Neidich’s Glossary restores human cognition to its rightful status: not as the passive object of technological interventions or reductive theorizing, but as the starting point for any viable form of egalitarian and liberatory politics.

About the Author

Warren Neidich was trained in fine art, architecture, and neuroscience. He founded the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, of which he has been the director since 2015. He is a former tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and he has been a visiting lecturer at Brown University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, Princeton University, Sorbonne University, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, among others.

Paperback, published in 2024, 296 pages.